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TITLE: Grisly Findings Embarrass Russians in Chechnya |
AUTHOR: |
PUB: AFP |
DATE: February 26, 2001 |
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Russia faced further embarrassment over its human rights record in Chechnya on Monday with a Council of Europe envoy heading to the region just as local people uncover evidence of mass killings in the capital Grozny. The Russian human rights group Memorial said that 27 bodies had been recovered and identified in a Grozny suburb after a chance discovery last week. Memorial representative Usam Baysayev, speaking by phone from Nazran in neighbouring Ingushetia, said the bodies had been found less than a kilometre (half a mile) from the headquarters of Russian forces in Chechnya at Khankala, in the capital's eastern suburbs. The gruesome discovery casts a cloud over a fact-finding visit to Chechnya this week by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, who arrived in Moscow Monday and was due to fly to Chechnya on Tuesday. Human rights in Chechnya will be further highlighted on Wednesday when a Russian soldier goes on trial on Wednesday for allegedly kidnapping and murdering a young Chechen woman in the first such case since Russian troops entered Chechnya 17 months ago. Baysayev said that among the 27 dead were three young men, including a 14-year-old, who went missing after they were arrested on December 12 by Russian troops in the villages of Dolinsky and Raduzhnoye, north of Grozny. All three had gunshot wounds to the head and one had his eyes gouged out, he said, quoting testimony from people who had travelled to Ingushetia to buy accessories for funerals. Baysayev said the bodies had been found lying in varying states of decomposition in abandoned houses and in a nearby ravine. He commented that "in the previous war (1994-94) they (the Russians) buried and tried to hide the dead. This time they're not even bothering to do that." The public prosecutor for Chechnya, Vsevolod Chernov, said three bodies had been identified with seven others awaiting identification, ITAR-TASS reported. The first bodies were found last Thursday at Dachny Posyolok, a small village halfway between Khankala and the Grozny suburb of Michurino, Baysayev said. Local people then flocked to the area in the hope of finding traces of missing relatives. After the first announcement of the discovery Saturday, Russian officials spoke of 200 bodies found in a mass grave. However they later revised the figure downwards to "at least 11." Late Monday Chernov said a total of 16 bodies had been found. Provisional autopsies suggested they had all been shot within the past one or two months, RIA-Novost reported him as saying. Military officials initially claimed the bodies were those of Chechen fighters killed during the capture of Grozny by Russian forces in February last year. On Sunday however they said all the dead were victims of rebel Chechen fighters. A spokesman for rebel Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov told AFP the bodies were those of "young Chechens arrested during Russian search operations in and around Grozny, then detained at the Khankala base before being reported as missing." Chechen officials said that local people had suspected the existence of a mass grave for some time but had not dared go to the area because it was so close to the Russian base. Chechen rebels abandoned Grozny in February last year after seven weeks of bloody clashes in which 368 Russian soldiers were killed and another 1,469 wounded. The Russian military at the time said they had killed some 1,500 Chechen fighters as they tried to leave the city. Meanwhile Gil-Robles, charged with assessing the situation in Chechnya and discussing human rights with the Russian authorities, began talks with officials in Moscow prior to heading south for a three-day visit to the northern Caucasus. He was due to meet regional officials prior to return to Moscow for further talks Friday. Meanwhile Colonel Yury Budanov was due to stand trial at Rostov Wednesday with hearings expected to last more than a week, with testimony from 28 witnesses, the AVN military news agency reported. The same court was also to hear allegations that another soldier stationed in Chechnya, Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Fyodorov, "exercised by firing on peaceful civilians," AVN said. Earlier, a prominent Russian war-correspondent accused Russian troops in Chechnya of widespread racism. In an interview in the daily Kommersant, Anna Politkovskaya, who was detained in Chechnya last week for allegedly entering the republic without authorisation, accused Russian troops of treating Chechens "not even as second-class citizens, but like sheep." She said racism in the armed forces affected "the whole military chain, from ordinary soldiers up to the command." END |